An encouraging guide to help women redefine their lives.
To escape patriarchal assumptions, women must invent a new storyline.
Lesser, co-founder of the Omega Institute, an adult education and retreat center in Rhinebeck, New York, draws on her own life, research on gender, and cultural myths to explore challenges to women’s power. Cassandra seems to her emblematic of women’s subjugation: Cursed by Apollo after she rejected him, she would forever be disbelieved. Although her prophecies told the truth, “her words fell flat.” Cassandra, like Eve, Pandora, and many other mythical and fictional women that Lesser cites, represents men’s views. “So much of the sorry state of our world hangs on the excess of the so-called masculine virtues in our guiding storylines,” writes the author. “So much was lost with the disparaging of anything coded feminine and the erasure of women as protagonists and heroes.” Why, for example, are there no monuments to women’s achievements but countless statues of male warriors? Invisible and silenced because of nature, nurture, and “the wounds of patriarchy,” women, Lesser believes, share a tendency to feel self-doubt, shame, and reticence, internalizing expectations “to stay in a narrow lane: mother, caregiver, keeper of the hearth, mender of the hearts, cleaner-uppers of the mess.” These qualities—nurturing, emotional intelligence, and “relational nature”—shape women leaders who are likely “to be more collaborative” and “less prone to corruption, to instinctively move to fill the empathy deficit, to seek wiser solutions to conflict.” To encourage women who, like her, are “trying to excel and contribute within a system built by and for men,” Lesser offers exercises designed to promote both activism and what she calls innervism: “the part of me that seeks inner change, inner healing.” These include meditation, guided reflection, listing sources of inspiration, prompts to help talk to someone with differing views, and writing one’s own obituary.
An encouraging guide to help women redefine their lives.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-288718-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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